To make a log of every flight you've taken, start a spreadsheet with one row per flight (date, flight number, from, to, and airline), then fill it from your booking emails, your airline accounts, the expired boarding passes in Apple Wallet and your old passports. Use three-letter airport codes like LHR and JFK so distances are easy to work out later. With good email records, ten years of flying can take a single evening.
The columns worth keeping
A log is only useful if every row has the same basics. Start with these:
| Column | Example | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Date | 2019-06-14 | Puts flights in order; use year-month-day so it sorts |
| Flight number | BA117 | Proves which flight it was |
| From | LHR | Three-letter airport code |
| To | JFK | Three-letter airport code |
| Airline | British Airways | For counting airlines |
| Notes | Window, delayed 2 h | Whatever you'll want to remember |
Add more only if you'll use them: aircraft type, seat, cabin, duration, or the reason for the trip. Leave distance for later; it can be worked out from the airports (see below).
One row per flight, not per trip. A trip from Boston to Bangkok via Doha is two flights: BOS–DOH and DOH–BKK. Logging each leg separately is what makes the distance and airport counts right, and it shows the layover countries clearly. Whether you count those layover countries as visited is a separate question: does a layover count as visiting a country?
Where to find your old flights
Work through these in order, adding rows as you go:
1. Your email
The richest source by far. Search your inbox for:
- "e-ticket", "booking confirmation", "itinerary", "boarding pass"
- the names of airlines you've flown
- "check-in" and "your flight"
Confirmation emails list the flight numbers, dates and airports. Sort results by date and work from oldest to newest. Watch for changes and cancellations, so you don't log a flight you never took.
2. Apple Wallet
If you've used mobile boarding passes, Wallet may still have them. Apple's guide shows how to see expired passes: open Wallet, tap the menu button and choose Expired. Each pass shows the details the airline put on it, usually the flight, route and date. Passes you deleted are gone.
3. Airline and loyalty accounts
Frequent-flyer accounts list past flights, but often only for recent years. Download or screenshot what's there; it may not be there next year.
4. Old passports and photos
Passport stamps show the date you entered a country, which narrows down the flight. Photos taken at an airport or from a plane window carry a time and place, which can pin down a route you'd forgotten. How to turn your passport stamps into a travel map and how to remember every place you've traveled cover both.
5. Your calendar and statements
Flights you booked for work may only exist in a calendar entry or an expense report. Card statements show the airline and date of a ticket purchase, a useful clue when nothing else survives.
When you don't know the flight number
For older flights, you often remember the route but not the number. That's fine. Log the date (or just the month and year), the two airports and the airline, and leave the flight number blank. The route is what matters for distances and maps. Mark guessed details with a "?" so you can tell them from confirmed ones.
Airport codes: get them right once
Airports with airline service have a three-letter code from IATA, the airline industry body, printed on bag tags and boarding passes: LHR is London Heathrow, CDG is Paris Charles de Gaulle, NRT is Tokyo Narita and HND is Tokyo Haneda. Cities with several airports are where logs go wrong, so check which one you used. "London" could be LHR, LGW, STN, LTN or LCY, and the distances differ.
What to do with the log
Once it's built, the log answers questions you couldn't before:
- How far have you flown? Add up the great-circle distance of each flight. Our flight distance calculator works it out airport to airport, and how far have you flown? explains the math and how to turn the total into laps of the Earth.
- How many airports and airlines? Count the unique codes in the From and To columns.
- Your longest flight. Sort by distance. Anything over 8,000 km (5,000 miles) is a line on the bucket list.
- Which countries you've flown to. Every arrival airport is in a country; that's a start on your list of countries.
Globestamp imports a flight log and shows how far you've flown: flights, kilometers, hours, airports and laps of the Earth. (The whole flight log is part of Pro.)
Keep it up from now on
The rebuild is the hard part. After that, add each flight on the day you fly, while the boarding pass is still in your Wallet. Keep the spreadsheet as a CSV file alongside your other backups, so it outlives any app. How to move your visited countries from one app to another has more on keeping data in open formats.